The Cool Bots and Action Could Only Help So Much

Rating: 5/10 (26 February 2018)

With Pacific Rim Uprising about to be released I felt compelled to watch its predecessor if I'm going to watch the Uprising.
Pacific Rim reminds me a lot of Robotech, a cartoon I used to watch a bit as a kid. At its core, Pacific Rim is an alien invasion movie not too unlike Independence Day. Earth is being serially attacked by these humongous creatures from another dimension coined Kaiju (which is Japanese for Monster). The world forces pooled their resources to create machinery to combat these Kaiju and they coined these mega machines Jaegers (German for giant). The Jaegers, operated by human pilots, dutifully protect the planet until the Kaiju become too much to handle. That's when they need real heroes.
If it weren't for the action this movie would be a total waste because the story and the dialog is extremely unimaginative. The script and the acting even is sophomoric and has no real depth. Fortunately they had extra cool robots to take our attention away from the story. But even the action got to be overdone. It became destruction porn. Large cities being easily ripped apart by giant aliens and their pursuers--that gets old. How many movies with mega-beings or super-beings are going to lay waste to cities? I can only stand to see so many buildings destroyed before it all looks the same.
The robots were nice, the creatures were nice but everything else was mediocre at best; the characters, the drama, the acting. This could've been a short film and been more effective.